Pages

Sunday, March 03, 2013

Yesterday I finished up the binding on my circle quilt. I am trying to make a dent in my UFOs and am glad to have this one done.

(my helper's arms were not quite long enough to hold the quilt out straight; it's a big quilt)

The quilt is 60" x 80", and I quilted it in a spiral, mostly using my walking foot. I had some issues with the layers shifting, even with the walking foot and having the presser foot pressure loosened. Part way through, I undid the remaining basting pins, smoothed the layers out again, and rebasted it, with the pins closer together than the first time. Then I loosened my presser foot pressure a little bit more and started quilting again. It went better after those changes, but there was still a little bit of minor shifting.

The center of the quilted spiral was quilted last, with my free motion quilting foot. I was really nervous about how that would go, but I was able to quilt it more smoothly than I expected.

The back of the quilt is pretty simple with red and yellow fabrics I got from Connecting Threads, and blue kelp I got on sale a while back.

Most of the binding came from my binding scraps (I had a lot of brown) and I added some red, yellow, and blue fabrics. It was nice to have most of the strips cut and pressed already.

This is my second circle quilt; my first one was a baby quilt made for my niece in 2010. When I made that quilt I wrote a couple of tutorial blog posts about designing your own circle quilt and drafting the patterns/templates for this block. Back then, I also promised a "how to figure yardage" post... and then I never wrote it. So I'm thinking I will go ahead and write that soon--let me know if you think it's something that would be helpful!

These Drunkard Path circle quilts are in my top-ten favorites. Nice choice for the quilting. Lovely, scrappy quilt. I'm curious.. did you mark the spiral, or just use a guide of some sort? Nicely done.

Just thought I"d let you know that you have inspired me to use multi color fabrics for the back of the quilt. I would have never thought it would look so nice to do that, but yours always do so I'm giving it a try on my next quilt. Thanks for sharing!